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I agree. People always fudge the numbers to give English a higher standing. Or to make it look like it rather.
Here is an example of how “statistics” are always changed so that it looks like English is above every other language. French is official in 29 countries and widely spoken in many others. The total population of France alone is about 68 million. Yet there is an article on THIS website that makes it look as if the other countries that speak French have a population of zero.
Here is that article:
There are a total of 67.8 million French speakers in 60 different countries worldwide. This is according to the Summer Institute of Linguistic’™s 16th edition of the World Ethnologue published in 2009. French ranks 16th among all world languages in terms of the number of speakers.

Given that no country has an accurate census and some don’t have one at all, for all we know there could be twice as many people as what is reported in these “statistics” who can speak a given language. And for some languages such as English, the total might only be half of what is actually reported. If a person can say “hello”, “good-bye”, “yes” and “no” in English they could get by with claiming that they speak the language and magically get added to the “total number”. Whilst with another language, such as French, there are plenty of people even in the US that speak it and never get added to an official figure. I know because I am one of them. I can speak French, I live in the US, and I’ve never been added to these so called accurate reports.